The Experiment
by Jason Layton
Summary: Dr Watson is left to clear up when Holmes leaves one of his experiments unfinished in the house.


**This story is for my friend SJ, who is so Holmesian I felt she needed her own story. I hope she likes it. If Holmes was a real person I have no doubt he and she would be acquainted, but she would have no need for me. :( **

**She really does have a legally acquired human skull called Penelope, although she pronounces it Penny-Lope.**

**(I know these aren't supposed to have real people in it, but I'm sure she won't mind and I've changed enough not to get her fired.)**

**Hope you like it, please review.**

She has just woken up, I know because her breathing has changed, but she doesn't want to open her eyes. It must be warm and snug in my bed and she is desperately trying to hang on to the bliss of that half conscious nothingness. Soon she's going to look around and realize she doesn't know where she is, then I'm going to have to calm her down. I don't want to have to sedate her again, so if she can wake up gently, warm and comfortable it will be easier to explain to her what's happening.

I've never seen her awake, I don't know what her voice sounds like, we have never shared a conversation and I have never read a word she's written. In all normal ways she is a complete stranger to me, but for the last two weeks I have been caring for her entirely. I have bathed her, cleaned her, tended to her, God help me sedated her, and kept her a silent prisoner in my bedroom. Over the last two weeks I have added kidnap, medical assault, theft, and drug appropriation to my growing list of crimes, all for the sake of a woman who wouldn't know me from Adam. All for my flat-mate Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes of course is not here, if he was I would go and get him, make him explain to this woman what we've done to her. However I haven't seen him for three days and he isn't replying to my urgent texts. He told me to bring her out of medical induced coma, a text message six hours ago told me to wake her up. Like a fool I did it, I thought he would be back, I thought he may have planned to be here, but that was short sighted of me, of course not, experiment over he left the cleaning up to me. I'm going to leave her for a few moments and get a jug of water. She'll be thirsty and it will give her chance to look around and assess the situation before I introduce myself.

As I look at my reflection in the tap, while filling up the jug, I realize I'd better tidy myself up a bit. She's going to be scared and confused and seeing me like this is going to freak her out more. I splash ice cold water over my face, sniff my shirt carefully, it will do, run a comb through my ruffled hair. Still looking more like a hung-over student than a competent doctor, I feel I've passed the deranged sex attacker look of a few minutes earlier, which is a relief. She will have realized by now she's wearing nothing but an old shirt of mine, she'll realize she's in somebody's bed, and sadly she'll realize she's hooked to a stolen heart monitor with a cannula in her hand. I'd like to stay in the kitchen, I'd like not to have to face her, but she is for better or worse my patient and my duty is to her.

When I return to the room I knock a small consideration but I hope it will put her better at ease.

'Come in?' a high pitched croak from inside, confirms she is really awake. Taken a deep breath, I push through the door with my jug and glass. She has pulled my duvet up to her neck, an odd protective gesture, somewhat childlike, her knees are drawn up as well, but she is staring at me in a curious not frightened way. I smile and balance the jug on the bracket table below the monitor. Holmes was clever when we were stealing this, we didn't take a modern clean lined flat monitor but this old bulky thing from a forgotten corner of A&E. Dressed in plain overalls, we picked it up and carried it downstairs to a waiting hired van. They must have thought we were taking it away to replace it, the hospital probably still waiting for the new one.

'I've brought you some water' I explain to her 'you'll be very thirsty' I hold out the glass for her, but she can't really grip it, so I gently support her head, and feed her the water sip by sip. As I do her eyes search my face, possibly looking for some familiarity; all I can do is smile.

She suddenly pulls away from me, and I take the glass away.

'Who are you? Where am I? What's going on?' She demands her voice stronger now, still high pitched a public school accent barely audible amongst the rhetoric.

'I'm Dr John Watson, I've been looking after you, you've not been.' I hesitate wondering how to frame this 'well?'

She came into my life in the usual way of all Holmes's experiments; I had been working at the hospital leaving him caseless and alone. I had expected to return to some kind of chaos, possibly the sound of gunfire as he shot at the walls, or an evil smell and a burnt counter top. When I pushed open the door to our flat however I found the main room unusually quiet. Holmes was slumped in his chair, playing with to my horror but not surprise a human brain. Its yellow clinical waste bucket was abandoned on its side on the floor, oozing its remaining contents on the floor. As I came in he looked up and dumped the organ back into the bucket.

'John! I'm glad your home, I need your help' he bounded across the room, a bright smile on his normal sallow visage, 'I think I've done something really, really bad? Will you help me?'

I wish then I'd refused, said no, said he should clean up his own mess, turned round and spent a few days somewhere else. However as he knew I would, I said yes of course. I was worried of course, even more so when he started leading me towards my own bedroom.

When I first saw her she was lying on top of my bed, unable to think how to secure her, Holmes had wrapped a car blanket tightly about her, trapping her arms by her sides. She was unconscious then, her long red hair still in a tight French plat, fully clothed except for her shoes which he had laid carefully beside the bed, her black cotton trousers had caught while he maneuvered her and now sat level with her bony hips exposing her hollowed stomach. She was wearing a dirty white T-shirt with blood splattered down one side, which left her skeletal arms where I could see them exposed to my gaze. Her feet, which were bare were the purple colour of poor blood supply, and again paper thin to the bone. I looked at her moon shaped face, her cheeks had a corpse pallor, around her eyes was black and hollow, and her lips and nose showed definite cyanosis.

'What the hell have you done?' I asked my friend, he had the look my sister's cat used to give me when presenting a dead mouse, 'are you stealing the whole corpse now?'

'She's still alive, John' he told me with his withering sarcasm, 'I may have kidnapped her though' he conceded.

When I examined her a faint pulse was found, and she was breathing shallowly. As I gently untrapped her arms Holmes was pacing the room with undisguised impatience.

'What has she taken?' I asked wearily the fresh track marks on her arms had shown me she was an addict, her keratotic palate showed me a she was a recent heavy smoker, and damaged capillaries of her nose showed a regular use of cocaine.

'Before she got here I don't exactly know, she wouldn't tell me, I have my suspicions as you do John.' He was impatient with my examination, finding me usually slow and methodical.

'She was conscious when she arrived here?' I asked, looking at him questioningly.

'Obviously Watson, otherwise I wouldn't have had to sedate her like this!'

My friend had given her a large dose of thiopentone, thankfully although whether by luck or design not enough to kill her. It was easy enough for once to get information out of him, I sat him down and asked him to explain why there was a sedated addict lying in my bed.

'I had to put her on your bed didn't I?' he answered my first question with a snide simplicity, 'my bed is…well you know not fit for company'. I was surprised by his consideration; normally he never seems to notice the pigpen he creates around himself.

'That isn't what I meant and you know it!' I told him, 'Who is she, why for God's name is she in the flat?'

'Her name is SJ and she works in the coroners mortuary at Kings Cross. She wanted to be an embalmer but well life has sort of got in the way, she works as a general dogsbody now. Fetching and carrying and measuring and cleaning, she also does the filing. I met her a few years ago and she fascinated me. I had been hanging around trying to get let back it after an incident; she always works the late shift letting in the midnight cases. One night she came out and asked if I wanted a cup of tea. I was taken a back, and thanked her. She had got a new boyfriend very recently; things were going well, she was happy. When I told her this she wasn't taken a back like most people are, she laughed. Told me she thought I should go and see my mother, that if I just stopped deducing them the police would take me more seriously and told me if I didn't start using shower gel rather than soap in the shower I'd open my self to dermatitis.'

'Do you know how many people can use deductive reasoning like that, Watson?' he asked me 'Me, that is all, no one else ever notices anything! She'd had an odd life, good family, traveled the globe, lived all over the world, spoke numerous languages, has two degrees from UCL. She had fallen in with the wrong crowd after university all bohemian chic and heavy drug use. There had been a child, and abusive partners, she'd fallen out with her family. Then she met this new man, he'd cleaned her up, fed her, looked after her, and her mind was starting to work again. I have very few friends, but she was willing to act as one. She steals me bits, lets me view bodies, provides me with some choice pieces for my experiments, more than you do Watson.'

'She even has her own skull, I introduced her to Yorik once, and she told me her own skull Penelope had more teeth, we were quite insulted! She lives in a flat on the Caledonian Road, above a commercial mortuary, so she has very useful double supply for me. She has some rather interesting connections to the oldest families in London. A nice little source of unusually domestic information which is always nice. If she could be bothered I would happily have had her studying my cases with me years ago.'

I asked him what had changed, why she was now the quasi corpse lying on my bed, but he looked sadly at me. I had obviously misunderstood the fundamentals of his tale, and he was upset by my lack of understanding.

'She's like me! This is what we do, we get bored and we experiment and we go on self-destruct. The new man is a soldier; an infantry grunt eighteen-month tour in Afghanistan has taken him away from her. Five months ago I went to see her about acquiring a human gall-bladder, but instead of relishing the challenge she threw a high heeled shoe at me, called me a psychopath and told me to get out of her flat. The next day I received a human gall bladder and a note of apology. She has been getting worse since then, when I saw her the other day she was a walking skeleton. I grabbed her arms and those track marks were visible, her teeth are loose, her eyes are hollow. She was in a bad way, I went to look for a corpse I knew was going to come in that night, but when I asked her she couldn't remember seeing it. She kept telling me a friend of hers, a girl called Christina had been murdered and she was waiting for her brain to come back from the path lab.' Sherlock pointed at the brain in a bucket 'This afternoon she brought it round for me, I couldn't let her go out, she would go and score, and it would kill her.'

'I made her a cup of tea, added rohypnol and put her on your bed.' I was utterly shocked, he explained he's been experimenting on himself with the date rape drug and had a lot left over, and that she had still struggled so he'd wrapped her in the blanket then administered thiopentone. Nothing in his behavior had seemed odd to him till afterwards. He had thought he could keep her sedated through the DT's, feed her up and all would be fine. 'Someone did it for me once' he had simply stated. I realized then of course that he was telling me how he'd like to be saved, when he next reached this level of self-destruction, this is hat he wanted me to do. This experiment was into whether I would willingly care for him in the same situation by seeing how I would treat a stranger.

It of course takes a lot of drugs time and equipment to keep someone this sedated for this long. Everything I have done in the last two weeks has been a struggle. First stealing the equipment, setting up a drip and monitor. I have spent a small fortune on portable oxygen cylinders, and sent Holmes to his darkest contacts with shopping lists of drugs. I had to strip and clean her daily as well as fit a catheter and keep it clean. Now as she is waking up, she doesn't understand what has happened to her, why we have done this. I have been explaining all this to her, but her brain is still fuzzy and I'm not sure she understands.

'Why me?' she asks me

'Because you were there when he was bored' I answer truthfully, wondering who he was playing with now.


End file.
